Mutual Interference Mitigation for Multiple Connected Automotive Radar Systems

The number of commercial and civilian vehicles equipped with automotive radars is expected to rise rapidly in the forthcoming years and with that comes the problem of increased mutual interference between the radar sensors, which can result in severely reduced radar sensitivity and increased false alarm rates. The difficulty and complexity of the problem increase with MIMO radar systems and multiply even further with a growing number of vehicles present on the scene. A system of connected vehicles can efficiently address this problem by sharing information amongst themselves. In this paper, we propose an efficient waveform design algorithm that seeks to minimize a collective cross-ambiguity function. Vehicles that can talk to each other, can perform the design online in a collaborative manner, or offline, in which case the radar codes can be designed and stored in a codebook for future use. The proposed coding scheme is computationally efficient for practical use and the incorporation of such schemes requires only a slight modification of the existing systems. Our numerical examples indicate that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the interference power level in a desired area of the radar cross-ambiguity functions.